Thoughts For the 20th Sunday after Pentecost

The 20th Sunday after Pentecost arrives as we work our way through the fall. It arrived less than a month ago and will take us up to Christmas. 

With that happy thought, we return to our mini-series on The Sense of Providence. We'll see how much of our emotional responses to events are manifestations of ego. 

But those of us who think we're less subject to emotion, who struggle to allow our reason room to run, will find the same "ego" behind a lot of our thought.

And with our understanding of "self's (ego) role in our responses to so much of what we encounter, we'll not become discouraged. Father Vann provides a way to change our ego-driven responses with our deeper understanding of God's Providence.

We'll see how "Thy Will be done," when fully understood, when expressed in a sincere manner, rather than as a rote response or the mouthing of words in a prayer can become our "go to" when events hit us where we don't want to be hit.

As with all the virtues, they rely on our solidifying their place in our lives through habit.

Let's begin... 

 

The Sense of Providence (Part 3 of 4)
Father Gerald Vann, O.P.

    “Sometimes it is when we are mere spectators that we find it hardest not be agitated and to fret: we see some tragedy impending and we feel powerless to prevent it: but we must try to see that our fretting is really in the last resort a form of egoism, a lack of faith and trust in God and dependence on God: our business should be to pray hard (we need never be mere spectators) but then to try to say, Thy will be done. Sometimes it is when we have started, and slowly built up, some project that we feel convinced is good, is for God, and then it is wrecked by circumstances outside our control, we want to grumble, we want to rebel; but no, we should remind ourselves that we never really know, in our tiny glimpse of God’s plan, what in the long run is really failure and what is success. Sometimes it is over ourselves, our own state of soul, that we become agitated in the bad sense: we cannot seem to cope with this or that temptation, we cannot seem to improve; but once again we must try to live in the present: doing our very best here and now, and neither brooding over our past failures nor letting ourselves sink into a sort of practical despair about the future. All things are in the hands of God.

     “Once again it is a question of training ourselves, and of starting in small ways. Think of some example of the sort of thing that causes you, individually, to become agitated and to fuss. It might be the missing of a train: you are on your way to some important duty, and it seems to be God’s will that you should do it; but you miss the train, and then you begin to fume and fret; you ‘get into a state’, and all to no purpose; whereas you should be telling yourself: Well, I thought God wanted me to catch the train, but He evidently didn’t, and so that’s that; if He wants me here, His will be done. And then you could fill in the time doing something useful instead of pacing up and down the platform like a caged lion and exacerbating your nerves and wasting your time.”
 

Happy 20th Sunday after Pentecost!